Jack Gamble, director of Campaign for the Arts, said that, in real terms, English councils had almost halved their cultural investment since 2010.

“The funding crisis in local government is a looming disaster for UK arts and culture. Taken together, local authorities are the biggest public funders of the arts – but proposals to cut local arts funding are sweeping the nation,” he said.

He added: “More and more organisations are learning that their council’s investment is collapsing or entirely disappearing, as local authorities of all political stripes buckle under cost and demand pressures. It’s deeply alarming to see the number and scale of the cuts being proposed. Every new threat to local public investment is a threat to all of this.”